


more alive to tenderness

by ronsenboobi (snewvilliurs)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 13:22:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15220058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snewvilliurs/pseuds/ronsenboobi
Summary: You crawled out from your own grave with the dirt of another man's life under your fingernails, with the ashes of another fire in your mouth that taste like something stolen.a bit of an experimental study in vignettes of molly and caleb's relationship, and the things that bring them together.





	more alive to tenderness

**Author's Note:**

> what it says on the tin; sorry if the style is a bit weird! for [salem](http://asteriiums.tumblr.com) ❤
> 
> title from "character of the happy warrior" by william wordsworth.

He has eyes of a blue so bright that it makes you wonder why you ever thought he could be boring; eyes pale with ghosts and icy as loss. He leaves lost footsteps wherever he goes, walking just to keep going forward. There is a heaviness to him that feels so foreign against the dizzying lightness of your nothing.

It takes a stranger to irony not to realize the contradictions, the equilibrium of it all: how he burrows in dirt and tatters as though begging the world to let him fade into the dust, how you glitter and gleam to damn near blinding because you can't bear the thought of you— _this_ you—being forgotten. You crawled out from your own grave with the dirt of another man's life under your fingernails, with the ashes of another fire in your mouth that taste like something stolen.

*******

Caleb remembers: that is his curse. There is, of course, the gap of hazy years lost to him, but Mollymauk can’t see that far into the razor-sharp shards of memory that slice at his back with every passing day. All he knows is that Caleb has a mind like parchment, drinking the ink that bleeds through from every little thing he sees—or like Mollymauk’s skin, marked with colours.

*******

You find yourself wondering which inches of your skin he remembers most clearly. Instead of asking yourself what your eyes saw when they belonged to someone else, for once, you ask of the silence what Caleb sees of who you are now. Does he look into the eye of the snake and feel dread? Or the peacock, giving him another reason not to trust you because you’re just too much?

You hope the vividness of his memory catches the sun and moon on your back, and then _he_ is vivid, and you can almost feel his lips against those lines of ink.

*******

The past is the past, Mollymauk says. Your past is the past. A past that belongs to someone else has nothing to do with me.

Caleb doesn’t say that his past belongs to someone else. The words would be shrapnel on his tongue; there is a part of him that fears the cold grip of his old master’s magic closing in around his soul again, so he stays quiet.

Hesitation has a way of settling into your bones. Caleb has forgotten how to be so cutting about everything; Mollymauk reminds him of what it was like to ask so few questions of himself.

*******

The thing is: he shook like you shook. Your body was buried like his mind; he broke through the chains of a fog the same way you broke from the earth.

*******

Caleb is left trembling like a leaf once he breaks free of the spell, the memories still winding around him—little wisps and great ones, trying to reach around his ankles and bind him in a time that is long gone. It’s not a spell he knows, and the hungry part of him wants to claw for the knowledge because there is no crueler banishment than this: to be held forever in a prison of one’s own past, even worse than the cage he once knew.

What grounds his feet so steadily in the present is a burst of purple flashing with gold, wrapped in reds and greens and blues—there was never so much colour in his world before, not even when everything promised to him was so bright. Mollymauk’s eyes stare, spiritless, into a distance that is out of reach of even his magic, but Caleb makes himself go forward until he’s close enough to touch his shoulders. This time, he can almost hear the spell hissing in Mollymauk’s ears; he can almost see the tendrils of past grabbing at him.

Thief, says a voice that sounds like Mollymauk’s and belongs to another. Thief, thief, thief, give me back my body.

Mollymauk, Caleb says, louder than that voice. Mollymauk.

He grabs at his coat and shakes him and only sees blank red staring back at him, and then he remembers how Mollymauk pulled him back from the flames, so he raises the back of his hand to Mollymauk’s face and hopes he never has to again.

Mollymauk looks at him and every breath seems sharp and cold in his lungs, but he is here.

The time for that is gone, Caleb says.

We’re here, Mollymauk says, halfway between a question and an affirmation he struggles to believe. We’re now.

Ja, Caleb says. We’re both here, now.

He shares half the weariness that draws Mollymauk’s shoulders down as they lean against each other, forehead to forehead, and breathe in the present—and for just a moment, Caleb touches his lips.

*******

It’s good, to lie next to another heart that doesn't know how to live with the time it has lost.


End file.
